Formal Clothes Quotes & Sayings

Even the street, the sunshine, the very air had a special Sunday quality. We walked differently on Sundays, with greater proprietyand stateliness. Greetings were more formal, more subdued, voices more meticulously polite. Everything was so smooth, bland, polished. And genuinely so, because this was Sunday. In church the rustling and the stillness were alike pervaded with the knowledge that all was for the best. Propriety ruled the universe. God was in His Heaven, and we were in our Sunday clothes. — Rose Wilder Lane

There was a time when formal clothes were one of life's great pleasures, as well as a way of describing instantly a man's status wealth. Toffs wore the most, the proles the least. Fast forward to 2008 and clothes are still an unrivalled pleasure but some men - and this includes many of our betters - have confused status with fake informality. — Peter York

In other spheres of Victorian Society the appeal of a young woman dressed in black from head to toe was acknowledged. In Victorian popular culture, widows had two manifestations: the battleaxe and the man-eater, preying upon husbands and bachelors alike. Even today, an attractive, dark-haired person dressed in all black has vampiric connotations, as the novelist Alison Lurie has noted, 'so archetypally terrifying and thrilling, that any black-haired, pale-complexioned man or woman who appears clad in all black formal clothes projects a destructive eroticism, sometimes without concious intention. — Catharine Arnold

Hogan began when tastes were changing and people were moving away from clothes that were not so formal: Hogan caught the right moment. — Andrea Della Valle

Monogamy, in brief, kills passion
and passion is the most dangerous of all the surviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. The civilized man
the ideal civilized man
is simply one who never sacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reaches perfection when he even ceases to love passionately
when he reduces the most profound of all his instinctive experiences from the level of an ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing the armies and workshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the infant death-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making it possible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at any hour of the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it. — H.L. Mencken

To leave the everpresent tension of Great Meadow was like shedding stiff, formal clothes or kicking off pinching shoes. — John McGahern

People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If you fold your clothes in the formal spark of joy, you can actually make the joy last longer. — Marie Kondo

As the four young women proceeded to a hallway leading toward the morning room, they encountered Lord St. Vincent, who was strolling in the opposite direction.
Elegant and dazzling in his formal clothes, he paused and regarded Evie with a caressing smile. "You appear to be escaping from something," he remarked.
"We are," Evie told her husband.
St. Vincent slid his arm around Evie's waist and asked in a conspiratorial whisper, "Where are you going?"
Evie thought for a moment. "Somewhere to powder Daisy's nose."
The viscount gave Daisy a dubious glance. "It takes all four of you? But it's such a little nose."
"We'll only be a few minutes, my lord," Evie said. "Will you make excuses for us?"
St. Vincent laughed gently. "I have an endless supply, my love," he assured her. — Lisa Kleypas

I like that this is your idea of formal dress, by the way. The same clothes as always, but recently laundered. Do you even know what level of swank La Vache is?" "I wasn't aware that swank operates on a tiered system," I said, pulling my luxuriously warm jeans back on. "They want a star pilot; I'm giving them what they expect. If you were hiring a mime artist, you wouldn't expect them to show up in business casual, would you." He — Yahtzee Croshaw

Meanwhile, Milo had been in the Senate on that day until it was dismissed and then came home. He changed out of his formal clothes, waited for a little while his wife got herself ready
you all know how that goes
and set out at the hour when Clodius, if he had been planning on coming back to Rome that day, would have returned. — Marcus Tullius Cicero